Article excerpt

Parties provide us with opportunities to convene and socialize at predetermined venues. Our personal experience has indicated that people may follow social norms at parties, but the environments and themes (e.g., pool, pajama, toga, swinger, porn star, and masquerade parties) along with props, alcohol, and drugs are used to drastically alter the expectations for how people might interact in these spaces. It might appear that the host makes a party roc/cor gives it hype. After all, it is the host who provides the basic party needs: food, beverage, seating, and music. Certainly it is more than the"space"and inclination to gather that makes a good party? However, the amenities and atmosphere are not in and of themselves measures of fun. The participants of a party, including the host and guests, are responsible for defining or challenging what it means to have a good time. Its participants take the responsibility of finding their own points of engagements within the party. If the participants are not engaged in the general mood of the party, they might initiate alternatives by staging various rituals such as games, dancing, or bonfires. People change the interactions of the party in order to introduce alternative points of engagement for themselves. The agenda of a party may spontaneously shift at any moment depending on the location, company, mood, resources and, more importantly, the interactions of its participants. While we may be more proud of some than others, the initiatives we might take at parties offer endless possibilities for creating memorable and engaging experiences. Can these initiatives for triggering new points of engagement at parties also serve as metaphors for how we might think about teaching and learning interactions? If the term, curriculum, is dislodged from its static association with written materials and school buildings, can our interactions at parties be seen as models for provoking new curricular relationships in the art class?

In the late 1 970s, leaders of the "reconceptualist movement" in curriculum theory, primarily Madeline Grumet and William Pinar (1976), led a shift from thinking of curriculum as a noun or object of learning to a verb or the actions of learning. "From this postmodern perspective, the curriculum is an interpretation of lived experiences rather than a static source of studies to be completed" (Slattery, 1995, p. 77). In this article, we see curriculum "as" performance - a set of behaviors documented and examined in hindsight, in order to discover possibilities for regenerative openness through new classroom interactions. Seeing curriculum as performance allows us to imagine it as a site where through alternative initiatives for engagement anything becomes possible within the school. To queer what educators have come to know as the art curriculum, we highlight the rituals and processes of not only the art room, but also a party. This is a purposeful co-mingling of performances from two separate spaces in order to provoke a queer remembrance not only of curriculum, but also the identification of ourselves as participants within it. By examining, in hindsight, the curriculum "as" performance and juxtaposing these considerations with performances of selfinitiated entertainment, like parties, we intend to trigger in the minds of curriculum facilitators endless possibilities for critically innovative and differently memorable experiences in the classroom.

Unfortunately, the art room and its school art traditions often set forth other expectations that could negate or even undermine the idea of curriculum as a site for regenerative possibility (Efland, 1976). Yet, looking at curriculum as performance allows us to imagine some traditional art students as unhappy party-goers following the lead of the art teacher, the facilitator or party host who is regarded as the absolute authority of content and interaction in the party. Do the events of the art room ever shift for its unhappy participants? …